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Wednesday, March 16, 2011

EASTER BUNNY VERSUS BILBY

As we approach Easter and lots of Easter Bunnies fill the shops I thought I might explain the Easter Bunny versus Bilby debate that happens every year in Australia.

This

rabbit

versus

this

Bilby

Rabbits were brought with the first fleet in 1788 when Australia was colonised as a convict settlement by the British and were kept captive for food.
Sailors stocked islands with rabbits to supply them with fresh meat.

Both of these sound reasonable things to do when you are trying to survive in what was a totally foreign environment.
Unfortunately ( for the Australian environment ) , in 1859, a man called Thomas Austin compounded the problem. Thomas was a landholder in Victoria who released 24 rabbits, 5 hares, and 72 partridges so that he could continue his favourite sport of hunting while in the colonies.

By 1900, the rabbits had reached plague proportions and were causing extreme environmental damage. They ring-barked trees, ate fields to oblivion and caused massive soil erosion by digging burrows.

The rabbit population exploded with few real predators (and those predators were feral animals too !!) and soon reached plague proportions.

An enormous rabbit proof fence was constructed to try to prevent the spread of the rabbit into the rich grazing lands of Western Australia but it was too late.

By 1950, there were an estimated 600 million of the beasts spread across Australia. They ate the grass the sheep should have had and the very squatters that released the pests suffered from denuded paddocks.

At first, the CSIRO's myxomatosis virus, introduced in the 1950s, killed up to 99 per cent of rabbits without infecting any other species, but as is the way with these things, the rabbits gradually became immune to the virus and the rabbit population began to increase once again. Another attempt at rabbit control was the introduction of a poison called 1080.

Unfortunately, when the rabbit is rapidly removed by poisoning or viral regimes, the predators that were feeding upon them need to find an alternative food source. Small marsupials, such as bilbies, are then hunted into extinction before the predators also see their numbers decline as well.

When this is coupled with loss of habitat it means the native animal, the Bilby, is in deep trouble.

Bilbies, the largest of our native bandicoots, used to live in habitats that covered 70% of Australia. Sadly that has been reduced to 20% and in South Australia bilbies were wiped out altogether in the 1930s, failing in a battle with foxes, cats and habitat loss.

In recent years there has been an enormous effort to save the bilby from extinction. Research and a successful captive breeding campaign plus the setting aside of a huge tract of land in south western Queensland has provided the bilby with a huge enclosure which is fenced to keep out predators and allow bilby numbers to grow once again in the wild.

Part of this campaign to save the Bilby involved trying to supplant the rabbit as the symbol of Easter with the Bilby and many children now receive a chocolate Easter Bilby instead of an Easter Bunny with a percentage of the profits going to aid Bilby conservation.

Australian scientists have recently turned to genetic engineering in a new fight against feral invaders. In 1995, the CSIRO developed a rabbit specific virus, rabbit calcivirus that resulted in numbers of rabbits declining up to 80% in some areas of Australia. This virus had been specially engineered to be highly infectious to only rabbits, and to overcome the difficulty of rabbits becoming immune.

Further info, facts and fun

*19 species of our native small mammals have become extinct since Europeans introduced the cat, fox and rabbit into Australia. ( that's in just over 200 years !!!)

* Australia also has its own tourists! Australian wallabies have become feral in England, possums have run wild in New Zealand, and Eucalyptus trees have become a serious problem in the United States.

*Australia is home to the only population of feral wild camels in the world. We have even exported them to Arab nations! "

It breaks my heart to think of the environmental damage caused by the introduction of non-native species. How many millennia did it take for Australia's unique fauna to evolve and how little time did it take for stupid human beings to spoil the natural order of things? May the little bilby thrive and good on those who have fought back against the idiocy!

Good grief, I've never seen so many rabbits in one picture! And I've never heard of a Bilby. I love it that there are still things to learn about the world, thank you for sharing the information. And yes, we do have eucalyptus trees everywhere. They are a problem in some places. For example in the hills around Oakland they had replaced most of the native vegetation. One winter there was a severe frost that killed a lot of them. The next summer there was a wildfire that ripped through the area and, fueled by eucalyptus, was hot enough to wipe out the whole community built around them. I guess the moral of the story is that we humans are not often as smart as we think we are.